Benny Rothman

Bernard Rothman, rambler and campaigner: born Manchester 1 June 1911; married 1937 Lily Crabtree (died 2001; one son, one daughter); died Billericay, Essex 23 January 2002.

Benny Rothman was a Communist activist who became a hero to the timidly bourgeois Ramblers' Association. He was jailed for four months (for "incitement to riotous assembly") after leading several hundred trespassers in April 1932 on to the Peak District moors of Kinder Scout, an area where the landowners strictly forbade walking. But this was only one clash with the ruling class among many which characterised his life in the 1930s.

Born into Jewish working-class poverty in Cheetham, Manchester, in 1911, Rothman won a scholarship to Manchester Central High School but had to go to work as a garage mechanic in his mid-teens. In 1930 he was fined for chalking Daily Worker slogans on the pavement. Three years later he was bound over "to keep the peace" when a British Union of Fascists' meeting at Crumpsall turned nasty. The same year he went to the help of a girl, Evelyn Taylor (later the union leader Jack Jones's wife), who was heckling Oswald Mosley – Rothman was thrown off the balcony of the hall by the leader's thugs, making a relatively soft landing on top of a blackshirt below.

Often unemployed and sometimes made redundant for his political activities, he volunteered in vain to drive an ambulance for the Spanish government – the Party probably found him more useful in the industrial cockpit of the north-west. Meanwhile he had married Lily Crabtree, a Communist mill girl from Rochdale, whom he met – in those warrior years – at a peace camp.

When the Second World War came Benny Rothman was established as an Amalgamated Engineering Union shop steward at the giant Metropolitan Vickers works at Trafford Park and later as representative of nearly 2,000 workers on the works committee. As an anti-Fascist he fought both to improve his members' rewards and to maximise war production. His pay and productivity deals were notable. Rejected for the forces, he joined the Home Guard, perhaps, like George Orwell, seeing it as the unlikely embryo of a people's militia.

After the war he worked to save jobs and in 1951 was sacked over a stoppage arising from a job-demarcation dispute. A strike won him conditional reinstatement at MetroVick but he preferred to work elsewhere. He served on the AEU district committee, as secretary or president on the Altrincham and Trafford Trades Councils and as delegate to the Lancashire and Cheshire Federation of Trades Councils.

Through the years of arid minutes, agendas, motions and disputes, faithful to the Party long after most comrades had departed, Rothman did not forget his youthful foray on to Kinder Scout. Camping at Rowarth nearby, some members of the British Workers' Sports Federation (a Communist body of which Rothman was a local official), had been chased off the grousemoors by gamekeepers. This was the spark that lit the fuse of the mass trespass a few weeks later. On the way to Kinder Scout the trespassers clashed with gamekeepers and "ringleaders" were arrested when they marched back to the village of Hayfield. The subsequent trial of what might now be called the "Kinder six" had all the makings of an iconic event: the jury packed with local nobs; Rothman conducting his own defence from the dock; the anti-Semitic judge; the crudely disproportionate sentences.

But the official ramblers' federations and later the Ramblers' Association claimed that the trespass had damaged their own "constitutional" but lacklustre campaign for access. After BBC TV marked the 40th anniversary of the event, Tom Stephenson, former secretary and grand old man of the Ramblers, rubbished the significance of the trespass, even claiming that the trespassers did not walk where they said they did.

Ten years later, at the 50th anniversary in 1982, it was the Ramblers who rehabilitated Rothman as star of the occasion. In the late 1980s and 1990s, David Beskine, the Ramblers' most astute access campaigner, was Rothman's impresario in the successful campaign for right-to-roam legislation. Each respected the other's organisational skills. As Beskine said, "You can always rely on Benny for a bus-load of demonstrators."

Beskine also put him on deputations to ministers and gave him top billing in the battle to save access to moorland gathering-grounds when the water authorities were privatised. Meanwhile Rothman found for himself a wider role in the campaign to save Twyford Down, in Hampshire, from road development; and at home in suburban Timperley took peaceful pleasure in his allotment.

A stroke put him in a wheelchair in 1994 and Lily, his comrade in every sense, died last year. Benny Rothman stood barely five feet high, but no man ever shouldered his way more determinedly through a crowd of ramblers or strikers to the platform, nor addressed them with more compelling conviction.

Chris Hall

In 1991 Benny Rothman presented a programme I made for Channel 4 about the history of power in the British landscape – who owned what and who had access to it, writes Philip Priestley.

For one shot to illustrate the exclusion of people from the land I located a stretch of country road with high wire fences on both sides. I got permission from the Ministry of Defence – whose fence it was – and we set up the camera on a grass verge to watch Benny striding by. Before we got properly started, a car full of athletic young men stopped next to us, and we were asked firmly what we were doing. I referred them to the MoD.

Then another car stopped. Then another. Two more senior-looking soldiers in civilian clothes appeared. One was a major, second in command he said, the other was his sergeant. Despite our official permit they asked us to desist, in case "our friends in the Provisional IRA" should glean useful intelligence.

Throughout the transaction, the sergeant kept one hand in his pocket. If they had known who Benny was, they might have been even more alarmed. In the end we went away without our shot. If I had been bolder I would have rolled the camera and tried to film a discussion between Benny and the soldiers of the SAS.

"Freedom," he said to camera at the end of the film, "isn't a battle you fight once, and win. It goes on for ever – for ever."